Identifying 5 signs of planets with "advanced" life

A research team led by Dr. Edward Schwieterman from the University of California has found the five most recognizable and accurate signs to identify whether a planet has civilization or not using available means.

According to Sci-New, those five special signals are five groups of greenhouse gases: Fluorinated versions of methane, ethane, and propane, along with gases made from nitrogen and fluorine or sulfur and fluorine.

The most important thing, Dr. Schwieterman said, is that these five groups of gases cannot exist in large quantities in nature. So if they exist in a level that humans can grasp through advanced observational means, aliens must have created them.

The research team calls the five gas groups above "technology markers".

The five gases proposed by the authors are used on Earth in industrial applications such as the production of computer chips.

Furthermore, if that civilization is more advanced than ours, they can utilize these very "deadly" things to improve the global environment.

"They would be good for a civilization to stave off an impending ice age or colonize an uninhabitable planet in their star system, as humans have proposed for Mars," said Dr Schwieterman.

For example, we have an icy, barren planet without liquid water - one of the essential conditions for life.

We could pump in more sulfur hexafluoride, which has the potential to heat the planet 23,500 times more than carbon dioxide, making it warm enough for the ice to partially melt into liquid water.

Another advantage of the proposed gases is that they are very long-lived. Under Earth conditions, they could be stored for up to 50,000 years.

Whether aliens accidentally created the aforementioned greenhouse gases through environmentally damaging industries or are trying to take advantage of them, it would be a sign that they are there.

More importantly, traces of these five greenhouse gas groups are easily detected in the spectrum with the "magic eye" of the James Webb telescope, even though they only exist in small amounts.

Some of the more advanced space observation vehicles that space agencies will launch in the future will of course be able to detect them.

The results, just published in the Astrophysical Journal, are an interesting filter that can be applied to sift through the more than 5,500 exoplanets known to humanity.

Most of those exoplanets were discovered by NASA's TESS satellite, and many of them are quite Earth-like, meaning they have a high chance of harboring life.